Last long run before SeaWheeze and a recap of this week in running!

This has been a busy and big week in running! I started the week at my parents house in Saskatoon.

Tuesday I ran 10 km’s with 6 hill repeats. My calves had been sore so I decided that I’d do hills instead of tempo to try to still work but not kill my legs like tempo does.

Wednesday we drove back to Calgary. It was a long day, spent solo with both girls in the car. I think it took us around 7.5 hrs to get home. Lori and I always run a medium long run on Wed night and I really wanted to make it happen. Luckily I have a super awesome understanding hubby who also was happy to spend the evening with his girls. I basically dropped them off, got our suitcases in the house, changed, and took off to meet Lori. We ran almost 14 km’s at a fairly fast for our us pace! It was just what I needed after such a long draining day. Unfortunately I made a bad shoe choice. I had been wearing some Mizuno Waveriders as long run shoes with my orthotics, and I moved my orthotics to some newer shoes for long runs. I wore the old shoes sans orthotics for this run. I think the laces around the toe box were too loose because my left foot had a bit of plantar fasciitis, and my right achilles was not happy. I wasn’t too worried about the PF, it has never been a bad injury for me, and a few days of rolling my foot with a tennis ball always takes care of it, but my right achilles has always been my ‘achilles heel’ so to say.

Thursday I had a negative split run scheduled. I thought I’d give it a try and see how I felt. I had worn my compression sleeves all night and had rolled my calves out pretty well. When I started running my legs just felt tired and I didn’t have much speed in them. Going in I thought that I’d go for a 5:45/km pace for the first half, and a 5:15-5:30 on the second half. I quickly decided to just keep it super easy on the first half, which ended up being around 6:00/km. The second half was faster at about a 5:30 pace, luckily I did have the wind at my back for the second half to help with that negative split.

Friday was a rest day. I spent it stretching, icing, rolling, doing calf raises, and repeating. It seemed to help a lot. By Saturday my achilles felt basically normal. I ran on the treadmill on Saturday to keep it nice and easy, and so that I could bail early easily if I felt I should. I had initially scheduled 8km/5 mi and decided that anything between 3-5 mi would be great. I ended up feeling really good, but cut it at 4 miles just to be safe.

Today was long run day. Lori and I wanted a route that we could just run and not worry about flood damage and pathway closures. We also have been running a lot of the same routes a lot and are burned out on them, so we decided to run the Harvest Half route (plus a bit) to keep things interesting. We started at my house (which is right around the 9k mark on the course). My achilles was feeling good, and both of us had quite a bit of pep in our step considering we were both running 64-65 km’s total this week. This is an all time high for Lori and my biggest week since 2011. It turned out to be a great run, the km’s ticked by super fast as we chatted and the weather was perfect (cool and zero wind). Our pace was great with most km’s being at a 5:45-6:00/km pace. There were some decent hills (614 ft elevation gain total), so I feel really good with those paces, and we both could have picked it up quite a bit at the end.

We just have one more ‘hard’ training run on Tuesday, and then everything on my schedule is ‘easy’ until SeaWheeze on August 10th. I’ve been trying to think a bit about what my goals should be, and will do a post on that topic soon. I’m feeling good though, and like I **might** be somewhere in the neighborhood of PR shape, though it scares me a bit to admit that here.